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BOB WOODWARD: THERE SURE ARE SOME SIMILARITIES BETWEEN BENGHAZI & WATERGATE
The scandals involving the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups, the DOJ snooping on the Associated Press’ phone records, and White House’s response to the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi have prompted some in the press to draw comparisons between the Obama and Nixon administrations.
Commenting on the IRS scandal, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward said Friday during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “It’s a big mess.”
“I know there have been these comparisons to Watergate. I would say not yet,” he added, “you’ve got to investigate all of these things.”
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough later said that the only really scandalous issue for President Obama is the one involving the IRS. The other two scandals (i.e. Benghazi and the DOJ), he added, are a little less serious.
Woodward disagreed with Scarborough’s characterization the Benghazi issue. That, the noted journalist explained, could turn out to be very serious indeed.
“If you read through all these emails, you see that everyone in the government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings,’” he said.
“And I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts to the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, ‘Oh, let’s not tell this, let’s not show this.’ I would not dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue,” he added.
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CBO: Obamacare in its First Decade Will Cost Double What the President Promised
It seems like with every new report, Obamacare just gets better and better.
Here’s the latest [from the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein]:
When President Obama was selling his health care legislation to Congress, he declared that “the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.”
But with the law’s major provisions set to kick in next year, a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office projects that the law will cost double that, or $1.8 trillion.
That’s trillion with a “T.”*
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Is The IRS Attempting to Intimidate Local Tea Parties?
May 12, 2013, Editor’s note: Colleen Owens broke this story on Right Side News on March 1, 2012, or over a year ago and supplied documentation (see PDF’s below). Finally the mainstream press breaks it. IRS senior officials knew Tea Party targeted as early as 2011.
by Colleen Owens
Richmond, Va | RightSideNews.com | In January and February of this year, the Internal Revenue Service began sending out letters to various local Tea Party groups across the country. Mailed from the same Cincinnati, Ohio IRS office, these letters have reached Tea Party groups in Virginia, Hawaii, Ohio and Texas (we are hearing of more daily). There are several common threads to these letters: all are requesting more information from these independent Tea Parties in regard to their nonprofit 501c4 applications (for these types of nonprofit, donations are not deductible). While some of the requests are reasonable, much of them are strikingly onerous and, dare I say, Orwellian in nature.
What are local Tea Partiers to think with requests like “Please identify your volunteers ” or are there board members or other officers who have run or will run for office (including relatives)”? What possible reason would the IRS have for Tea Parties to “name your donors ” when said donations are non-deductible? These are just a few of the questions asked by the IRS in these letters, and one cannot help but suspect an intrinsic threat encompassing all these demands. (see more letters below)
The other question is the timing of these IRS letters requesting reams of copies and hundreds of hours of work and potentially thousands of dollars in accounting/legal fees.(all due in two weeks) Some of these Tea Party groups have not received anything concerning their nonprofit status since 2010 prior to these letters.
These documents are further undermined by a letter sent to the IRS Commissioner Shulman. Signed by six Senators, it requests that the commissioner investigate 501c4 groups to determine whether they are engaging in substantial campaign activity, including opposition to any candidate. Who signed this letter? Senators Schumer, Franken, Udall, Shaheen, Whitehouse, Merkley and Bennet — all Democrats.
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Did Obama Know Too? IRS Officials Knew Patriots And Tea Party Groups Were Being Targeted 2 Years Ago
The IRS has finally publicly admitted that patriots and Tea Party groups were being specifically targeted for “extra scrutiny”, but the truth is that top IRS officials knew that this intimidating and harassing behavior was taking place two years ago. A report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration that is going to be released this week shows that the targeting of patriots and Tea Party groups began as early as March 2010, and that the head of the IRS tax-exempt organizations division was specifically told about this targeting in June 2011. But then the IRS lied to Congress five separate times between November 18th, 2011 and June 15th, 2012 about what was going on. IRS officials flat out lied to Congress and adamantly denied that patriots and Tea Party groups had been specifically targeted. So should we believe the IRS now when they try to pin the blame on a few “low-level” employees in Cincinnati? And were Barack Obama or any members of his administration ever told about any of this? After all, patriot groups and Tea Party organizations were screaming bloody murder about this harassment at the time and if the truth had come out before the election it could have been a massive embarrassment for the Obama campaign. Are we to believe that nobody inside the Obama campaign ever had any discussions about this? If Obama or those close to him did know what was going on, why didn’t they ever do anything to stop it?
According to Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS unit that oversees tax-exempt groups, any groups that had the words “patriot” or “tea party” in their names were specifically targeted for additional scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status. The demands that were made on some of these groups were extraordinary.
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Is the Department of Homeland Security Obama’s Gestapo?
When Adolf Hitler made his rise to power, he established the Secret State Police in 1934, headed by Heinrich Himmler. The German name for them is Geheime Staatspolizei. Taking the bolded and underlined letters from the newly formed entity you get the more familiar term, Gestapo.
The role of the Gestapo was to spy on the German people and identify any and all opposition to Hitler’s Third Reich. They were given full authority to investigate and report or suspect cases of criminal attacks against the Nazi Party along with cases of sabotage, espionage and treason. What made them so deadly and sinister was that they were also given authority to act without any judicial oversight. They became the prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner of anyone that stood in Hitler’s way.
The Gestapo was given a sizeable budget and access to all the weapons, ammunitions and spying devices they wanted. Once they established their dark reputation, they used all of those devices and weapons far too frequently. Within a few years, no one dared to say or do anything that might be considered critical of the Nazi Party and its leaders. If they did, the Gestapo or its sister agency, the SS (Security Service) moved in and took care of the alleged problem.
Eighty years later, Barak Obama talks about creating a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, strong and as well-funded as the US military. In 2008, Obama talked about his desire to create his civilian army, but many of the references to that speech have mysteriously disappeared. However, the following clip of Obama’s admission:
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Americans Convinced Gun Homicides Soar Despite Actual Plunge In Gun Crimes
In yet another example of the massive gap between the American people’s perception of what is going on around them (whether by propaganda channels or simply cognitive bias) and the actual reality, Reuters reports that while gun-related homicides are down 39% from the 1993 peak, only 12% of people believe that gun crimes have fallen. Non-fatal firearm crimes declined by 69% to 467,300 in the same period but 56% of Americans believe that gun crime is higher now than it was 20 years ago, the Pew Research Center said its poll showed. The dichotomy between record food stamp usage (and non-employment) and multi-year highs in consumer sentiment comes to mind – we wonder which is more ‘real’.
Highlights of the report:
- Firearm-related homicides declined 39%, from 18,253 in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011.
- Nonfatal firearm crimes declined 69%, from 1.5 million victimizations in 1993 to 467,300 victimizations in 2011.
- For both fatal and nonfatal firearm victimizations, the majority of the decline occurred during the 10-year period from 1993 to 2002.
- Firearm violence accounted for about 70% of all homicides and less than 10% of all nonfatal violent crime from 1993 to 2011.
- About 70% to 80% of firearm homicides and 90% of nonfatal firearm victimizations were committed with a handgun from 1993 to 2011.
- From 1993 to 2010, males, blacks, and persons ages 18 to 24 had the highest rates of firearm homicide.
- In 2007-11, about 23% of victims of nonfatal firearm crime were injured.
- About 61% of nonfatal firearm violence was reported to the police in 2007-11.
- In 2007-11, less than 1% of victims in all nonfatal violent crimes reported using a firearm to defend themselves during the incident.
- In 2004, among state prison inmates who possessed a gun at the time of offense, less than 2% bought their firearm at a flea market or gun show and 40% obtained their firearm from an illegal source.
- Males, blacks, and persons ages 18 to 24 were most likely to be victims of firearm violence
